Marketing a Yoga Business: Ultimate Guide (2020)

Looking to grow your business with some new yoga marketing ideas? You’re in the right place!

Whether you want to open up your own studio, run a yoga retreat, or you’re thinking of becoming a freelance yoga teacher, having a good marketing strategy is essential if you want your business to be a success.

Below are all of our best marketing tips for yoga instructors, covering all of the right channels and strategies to use, as well as how to decide what suits your business best.

But before we get started, why not enquire about our Level 4 Nutrition for Sport course and develop the knowledge to offer nutritional advice and meal planning to your yoga students.

What is Marketing?

This might seem like a really simple question, but you’d be surprised how many people confuse marketing, advertising, and sales.

“Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.”

The aim of any marketing strategy is to attract new customers (or in your case, students) to your business and get them to buy your products or services.

There are tons of different approaches to marketing, both online and offline, with any good strategy using various different marketing channels to reach out to their potential customers.

Whether you’re unsure on how to approach a marketing strategy for yoga retreats or you just want some new ways of getting students into your studio, this article is full of the best tips and tricks that are guaranteed to help you to grow your yoga business.

But before you can even think about how you’re going to start your yoga marketing plan, you’ll need to have a good understanding of your target market.

Already carried out extensive market research as part of writing up your yoga business plan? You can skip this small section and get stuck into our marketing tips for yoga teachers.

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Yoga Marketing Plan: Who Is Your Target Audience?

Having a clear target audience when marketing a yoga business takes out all of the guesswork and stops you from wasting time and money on marketing materials that don’t reach the right people.

Before you even think about what marketing channels you’re going to use or what content you should post, you’ll need to know exactly what kind of person you’re trying to promote your business to.

It’s not enough to simply choose a target market based on what kind of students you would like to teach, instead, your decision should be based on the findings of market research.

Good market research involves communicating with your potential customers by carrying out interviews, organising focus groups, or using online platforms like SurveyMonkey.

This will allow you to ask questions about the typical profile of your target audience, including key demographics like their age, gender, location, and income.

As part of this research, you should also ask more insightful questions, such as what yoga-related products or services they would like a local business to offer.

Asking all of these important questions will allow you to identify a target audience and define exactly what they are looking for from a yoga teacher or studio. From there, you can market your yoga business as a solution to match those demands exactly!

Yoga Teacher Marketing: Choose Your Niche

Once you’ve identified who your target market is, you’ll need to decide on a niche.

This might not seem entirely relevant to marketing your yoga business, but trust us, having a niche is one of the most effective ways to communicate a clear brand message.

Plus, by creating a niche, you also create the perception that you are an expert in that specific area of Yoga.

This will attract students to your studio and in some cases make them willing to pay a little extra for your expertise.

How To Decide On Your Niche

The unfortunate fact is that no matter how passionate you feel about a particular style of yoga if there is already a studio near you that specialises in exactly that, the demand for your business just won’t be there.

But don’t sweat it! There are endless different directions that you can go in when deciding on a niche for your business.

You could cater to a specific demographic, such as age or gender, or choose a style of yoga that your target audience mentioned in your research.

Alternatively, change up your location! Who said you had to teach yoga in a studio? As long as you have the right yoga teacher insurance, starting an outdoor yoga retreat or teaching rooftop classes could be a refreshing change for yourself and your students!

Marketing For Yoga Instructors: Decide On A Name & Logo

Once you have decided on a niche and what kind of products or services you will offer, you can start to think more about what you’re going to call your business.

Your business name and branding can say a lot about your business which is why it should always be considered as part of any yoga marketing plan.

Even small details, like the colour scheme you choose, can say a lot more about your business than you might think.

For example, the colour blue is associated with peacefulness, water, and tranquility, and the colour green is commonly associated with nature and health. So, these colours would be perfect if you’re marketing yoga retreats!

If you’re marketing a hot yoga studio, then reds and oranges might be a better option!

Whatever your business, it’s definitely worth considering the connotations of colours when deciding on the colour scheme for your branding.

When you do pick a colour, you’ll need to stick with it and use it consistently throughout every marketing channel that you use. This makes your marketing strategy more effective and improves brand visibility.

The Yoga Marketing Ideas You Need To Try

Once you’ve identified your target market and decided on a niche for your business, it should be pretty easy to decide what products and services you’re going to sell.

The next thing to think about is “how can I get the word out there about my business?”

Well, the short answer is - Marketing!

This is where all of our marketing tips for yoga studios will really come in handy. So what are you waiting for? Here all of the best ways of marketing your yoga business.

Yoga Social Media Marketing

You don’t need to be an expert in marketing to know that creating a business profile on each of the big social media platforms will benefit your business in some kind of way.

But there’s much more to marketing your yoga studio than putting up a post advertising your classes every now and then.

Want to be up there with the best yoga studios in the UK? Maximise the number of people who see your posts and grow your business by following our favorite yoga marketing tips below.

Research The Competition

Before you skip straight to posting on your socials, do your research and get familiar with each platform.

The four main social media platforms to consider are:

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Twitter

Each platform serves a different purpose, so remember that what does well on Instagram, won’t always work on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

For example, LinkedIn is a lot more professional with an emphasis on in-depth and informative posts, whereas Instagram is very much about using aesthetic posts to grab attention.

To get a good idea of what kind of content will work on certain platforms, research what your competitors are posting and how their content is performing.

Research which of your competitors performs the best on each platform, and don’t assume that the brand with the biggest facebook page is also the most successful on all of the other platforms.

Once you’ve found the brands that perform the best on each platform, use their content and post times for inspiration, but make yours better!

If there’s something that works really well for them, think about how you can make yours bigger and better.

Say they’ve posted the occasional infographic and had them shared tons of times, you need to make yours more informative, more aesthetic, and more frequent.

Unsure on where to start with this research? It’s actually pretty simple!

Using Hashtags To Do Competitor Research

In a little bit, we’ll explain how hashtags can help potential customers to find your page.

But for now we’re going to talk about how you can search through Instagram hashtags to find your competitors, as well as why you need to do this.

Looking through relevant hashtags like “#yogainspiration” will bring up every post using that specific hashtag, as shown below:

Here you can see exactly what kind of posts are the most popular for these relevant hashtags, which is a good indication of the kind of content that you should be posting.

As you can see above, the same kind of content comes up for similar hashtags, such as ‘#dailyyoga’. This shows that this kind of aesthetic and type of post is popular among yoga lovers.

If you then go through the images, you can learn more about how these accounts have used hashtags to increase their reach and managed to get their post as a top for a hashtag with 10.1 million posts.

Using Captions & Hashtags To Improve Reach

Hashtags group together content, making it easier for users who are interested in yoga but don’t follow you to find your page and your posts.

With the right hashtags, you can organically grow your page and gain tons of new followers that are genuinely interested in the content you post.

Now that you know how to find the posts and profiles that are performing well for yoga-related hashtags, how are you going to get your post to perform that well, or even better?

Getting your post on the top page for a hashtag as big as ‘#yogainspriation’ will massively improve your reach and get your content viewed by tons more people!

If you want to improve your reach and grow your presence on social media, here are the best yoga instagram marketing tips for great content.

Choose A Good Caption

During our research, we found that a lot of the yoga-related posts that performed well used inspirational quotes as part of their caption.

These captions fit very well with the kind of aesthetic that is popular among yoga captions, and clearly, yogi’s love them! The comments on this post are filled with yoga lovers sharing how much they love the quote.

Comments are a brilliant way to increase engagement and ‘boost’ your post. Whilst no one can be 100% certain on how social media algorithms work, it’s widely assumed that the more that users engage with your post, the better it will perform.

A user's Instagram feed is a reflection of how users behave on the app, so the more somebody engages with your content, the more your content will appear on their timeline.

This is why a lot of successful yoga accounts use questions in their caption or try to start a conversation within their caption, encouraging you to leave a comment!

Stay Relevant & Start A Conversation With Your Audience

As you can see in the example above, not only has this account asked a question and used a conversational tone in their caption, it has also made their post relevant by associating their content with a special occasion or holiday, in this case - Mother’s day.

This is a brilliant way of keeping content relevant and varied.

It’s a strategy that has proven especially useful in the current climate. With the majority of us living in lockdown, we’re forced to practice in our own homes rather than at a studio.

Any effective marketing strategy should have started to use ‘#homeyoga’ within their posts, as more and more people turn to social media for help on how they can practice yoga at home.

Whilst we could never have predicted what’s going on in the world at the moment, there are tons of dates and occasions that you can be prepared for!

It’s a good idea to keep a diary of all of the dates and occasions that might be important to your followers. This can be a directly relevant post using ‘#yogaday2020’ or something more generic, like world mental health day, or earth day.

There are endless days, weeks, and months dedicated to specific causes, find yourself a full marketing calendar and get creative!

Using Memes & Challenges Within Your Content

Whilst it’s pretty clear that yogi’s love posts of others sharing their favorite yoga poses with an aesthetic setting, sharing yoga memes and getting involved in online challenges is also a brilliant way to use hashtags as part of your yoga social media strategy.

Memes are a brilliant way to boost your engagement as users love to share relatable memes and tag their yoga-loving friends.

As we mentioned a little earlier, the more your audience engages with your content through actions like comments and shares, the more users your post will reach and the bigger your brand can grow!

Getting involved with yoga challenges and other viral trends is also a great way to keep your content uptodate and have your post featured on the most popular hashtags.

#30dayyogachallenge anyone? Or how about capitalising on that yoga poses for 2 trend? Whatever you choose, have your followers get involved and encourage them to let you know how they’re getting on!

Using Localised Hashtags

Focusing on big volume hashtags like ‘#yogainspiration’ is really important to get your content seen by as many people as possible and increase the number of followers you have. This is really important, especially if you run an online yoga business!

But, smaller and more localised hashtags are equally as important if you’re a freelance teacher or if you have your own yoga studio.

Say you have a studio based in manchester, you should be looking through the top posts for hashtags such as ‘#yogateachermanchester’ or ‘#yogisofmanchester’.

As you can see, there are nowhere near as many posts for these hashtags.

But, including your specific location will make it a lot easier to find your direct competitors.

You can find every yoga teacher in the area who is using those hashtags and have a look at what kind of content works well for them.

And let's be real, if they aren’t using location-specific or yoga-related hashtags, then their social strategy isn’t worth looking at anyway!

This strategy can apply to pretty much anybody that you think would enjoy your content, or anybody with a big following of people who might like your account.

You should interact with these accounts by following them, commenting on their posts, and sharing their content!

How Do Interactions Help Your Yoga Instagram Marketing Strategy?

You're probably thinking that by commenting and sharing other accounts posts that you are helping to grow their account rather than your own. Whilst this is technically true, this strategy will still benefit you massively!

Commenting on the post of an influencer with a big following of yoga lovers will get your account seen by everyone one of their followers that looks at their comments.

If your name keeps coming up alongside the yoga accounts they love, they’ll be intrigued and check out your account.

This yoga social media marketing strategy works with smaller accounts too, as small brands and influencers still have a really high level of engagement and their followers are usually a more niche group of individuals. Ie, they’re specifically interested in yoga content!

Yoga Social Media Marketing: Be Consistent

As we mentioned when we talked about choosing brand colours and a logo, the importance of consistency in marketing also applies to social media marketing!

Consistency is really important for all aspects of marketing in general, as it makes your business recognisable to the audience and builds brand awareness.

Focusing on social media specifically, you should ensure consistency by using the same business name and logo on every social media platform.

The more your target market sees your branding and message, the more likely it will be that they’ll remember your brand. Then, when they’re thinking of a new yoga class to try, they’ll think of your business first.

Follow The 80-20 Rule

When it comes to the kind of content that you post, plastering promotions all over your feed is not the way to go. Instead, aim to follow the 80-20 rule.

There’s a reason this rule is raved about on tons of marketing blogs - it works!

According to this rule, 80% of what you post should be content that informs, educates, and entertains your followers, and the remaining 20% should promote your products and services.

The main goal of your yoga studio marketing plan is to promote and ultimately sell the products and services your business offers, but a hard sell approach isn't always effective on social media.

Don’t believe us? Just look at the screenshots that we shared earlier. All of the most popular yoga related posts are those that the audience find entertaining - a new yoga pose or quick workout video.

This is why it’s important to create content that adds value to your followers' experience, whether that’s by sharing an informative video, posting an infographic with some fun facts, or even a good meme.

This encourages your audience to engage with your content as it welcomes comments and it is more likely to be shared, which of course improves the reach of your post.

Plus, sharing facts and stats also allows you to show off your knowledge and market yourself as a real expert in the field!

For the remaining 20%, offers and competitions are always a good way of getting an audience's attention.

Creating urgency around your promotion is the best way to encourage the audience to take an action - that is, make an enquiry or book on to one of your classes.

This also applies to any products that you offer purely for the purpose of generating some additional income. Whether that's yoga blocks, yoga mats, or even clothing, making sure that you don't over do it on the direct selling is key.

Yoga Social Media Marketing:Collaborate!

The final tip for all things organic on social media is to collaborate with other brands and businesses that have a similar target market to yours.

This works well for promotional content, especially competitions!

By collaborating with similar businesses, such as activewear and supplement brands, you can get your content in front of an active and healthy audience that is more likely to be interested in your business.

Collaborations allow a bigger giveaway of freebies which will make more people want to enter your competition, generating more engagement and increasing the number of people that will see your post.

The algorithms on social media platforms are designed to show users the most relevant content. This is based on the kind of content the user engages with, so the more they like, comment, and share your posts, the more frequently your posts will appear on their feed.

If you want your competition to result in an increased following and engagement, ask that your followers like, comment, and share your posts to enter into the competition.

You can even ask that they tag their friends in the comments, to bring an even bigger audience to your page and make them aware of your business.

Yoga Advertising Ideas: Paid Ads on Facebook And Instagram

There are endless ways that your business can benefit from social media for free, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use paid ads, too.

The best tool for this is Facebook Ads Manager where you can set up paid ads for Facebook and Instagram.

This platform is really easy to use, so don’t stress if you aren’t up to scratch with your marketing skills.

The platform allows you to set up yoga advertising to target a specific audience, with filters for key demographics such as age, interests, gender, and location, so that your ads will be directed to your target market.

Want to learn more about advertising, marketing, sales, and running a fitness business in general? Why not complete a Yoga marketing course! Get more information about our REPs accredited fitness business CPD here.

Online Yoga Teacher Marketing Ideas

There’s much more to digital marketing for yoga studios than social media alone.

A lot of people really focus on creating a good social media marketing strategy, which is a good thing, as long as you don’t miss out on other opportunities to promote your business online!

Below are the best online yoga marketing ideas that you need to try.

If you really want to get the message out there about your business, then offline marketing should not be forgotten about either!

Once we’ve covered digital marketing for yoga studios and businesses, we’ve included the best offline approaches to promoting your business. Chances are, your competitors are only thinking about social media, so stick with us for your opportunity to get ahead.

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Online Workshops & Webinars

One way to turn inactive social media followers into leads for your business is to inform them of how your business can benefit them.

The purpose of all yoga marketing strategies is to promote sales so no matter how many people see a picture of your latest yoga pose, if nobody actually takes the action of enquiring with you, is it really worth it?

To get your audience to want to come to your studio or visit your yoga retreat, show them why they should want to do that!

Hosting a webinar where you discuss the benefits of yoga, the problems it can solve, and what is so unique about you and your business, is a brilliant way to get people interested.

This strategy is especially effective if you’re setting up an online Yoga business.

You get to show off your expertise, share some valuable information, and basically explain why you’re the best in the business.

You can advertise the date and time of your webinar across your social media pages, creating a Facebook event, and counting down to the day of the webinar across all 4 of the main social media platforms.

When it comes to hosting your online workshop, you can use IGTV, Facebook live, YouTube, or even Zoom if you want to have more of a dialogue with the audience.

To turn your webinar audience into high quality leads, ask attendees for their contact information and send some follow-up emails once the workshop is over. Just make sure you follow the rules of GDPR for fitness professionals!

The leads that you get from webinars and workshops are always high quality, as your audience are genuinely interested in yoga in some way and actively seeking to learn more about the services that you offer.

If your business isn’t based online and you feel a little awkward talking into a camera, that’s fine! Face-to-face workshops are just as effective.

Yoga Marketing Website: Why You Need One

Although you could technically run your yoga business through your social media pages, we strongly suggest that you get a website for your business.

If you aren’t starting an online business, this isn’t absolutely essential, but having your own website will allow you to expand your online marketing strategy and increase brand visibility!

Not only that, having a website makes your business look more professional. A claim that is backed up by a consumer survey which found that 84% of people think a website makes a business appear more credible.

If you’re not convinced that paying for a web designer is a worthy expense at the minute, creating a landing page is a good alternative to start off with.

With the likes of Mailchimp, you can build a professional looking landing page for a fairly low cost and it’s really easy to do.

This kind of page typically features your business name and logo, and a call to action - usually an enquiry box that looks a little something like this:

Whether you choose to opt for a full website or a landing page alone, by choosing at least one of these options, you’ll open up the opportunity to various different online yoga marketing strategies, the best of which are listed below!

If you’re not convinced that you need a yoga marketing website or even a landing page, at the very least you should buy your domain name now. That way, you have it ready for when you do choose to set up your website.

Who knows, once you’ve finished reading the rest of our online marketing tips for yoga teachers, you might have changed your mind on building a website.

Google My Business for Yoga Teacher Marketing

Every new yoga business should set up a Google My Business account.

It’s actually pretty shocking how many yoga teachers and even studios don’t have a Google My Business account set up, especially considering how easy it is to set up, nevermind how much it can benefit your business for absolutely no cost.

Regardless of how big or small your business is, even as a sole trader, setting up a Google My Business account is not something that should be overlooked as part of any good yoga marketing plan.

Once you’ve created an account, your business will show up on the map when a Google user searches for services in their area. For example, if they search “yoga studio near me”, then local businesses will come up in a list, right at the top of Google!

Here’s what that looks like:

The top spot of Google would be pretty expensive if you were to bid for it as part of a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy, so you should jump at the chance to be on the first page of Google for free.

The list does come below any ads, but as you can see in our example above, if there aren’t any paid ads for that particular term, your business will come up right at the top of the first page!

From there, your new students can click straight to your website or social media page, check out your Google reviews, find your contact information, or get directions to your studio.

Top tip: once you’ve got your business up and running, maximise the benefits of your Google My Business profile by asking your students to review you on Google!

SEO & Content Marketing Tips for Your Yoga Business

Another way to rank for some key terms without paying for Google Ads, is to optimise your website for SEO (search engine optimisation).

SEO is a huge part of marketing and some of the processes can be confusing, but that doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore it!

The benefits of being able to rank for important terms like ‘Yoga studio + LOCATION’ are too good to miss out on.

To get started, these are the simple steps that you should take to optimise your website for SEO.

#1 Perform keyword research and optimise pages around these keywords

Using a tool such as Google keyword planner, search for popular search terms and keywords related to your business and the services you offer.

You should think of anything that your target market might type into Google when they’re looking for the kind of services that you offer.

Don’t worry, this process isn’t anywhere near as time-consuming as you might think, because keyword planner will do a lot of the work for you.

So what kind of keywords should you look for?

Say you have a page dedicated to the yoga retreat service that you run in Scotland, some good keywords might be:

‘Yoga Retreat Scotland’

‘Scotland Yoga Retreat’

‘Yoga Retreat Highlands Scotland’

Google planner will pull up tons of potential keywords relevant to your business, all of which you can then include in the descriptions on your website.

Including keywords on your homepage, sales page, and across your entire website is a good way to get your website to rank, making it much easier for potential customers to find you.

#2 Increase dwell time by including images and keeping text short

Dwell time is the amount of time a user spends on your page, so naturally, you want this to be as high as possible!

The best way to increase dwell time is to have a user-friendly site that looks professional and is easy to navigate.

Including high-quality images and keeping paragraphs of text fairly short are key to keeping a professional appearance and keeping your information clear and concise.

#3 Include Calls To Action

A clear and visible CTA (Call To Action) makes it as easy as possible for anybody who lands on your website to make an enquiry.

The last thing you want is for somebody who is interested in your business to land on your page and leave before making an enquiry.

Make it as easy as possible for your audience to make an enquiry by adding a capture box on to every page, placing it in a position where it is clearly visible.

In case you missed it earlier, here’s an example of the kind of CTA we include on both our course pages and within our blog articles:

Yoga Studio Marketing Ideas: Start a Blog!

Speaking of blog articles, another way of advertising yoga services that is often overlooked, is to start your very own blog.

If you don’t have a website, then blogging isn’t an option right now, but it’s worth knowing about how it can benefit your business, so don’t skip to the next step just yet!

Basically, the purpose of creating a blog is to write about the yoga topics that your target market search for on the likes of Google and Bing.

As an example, here is this exact yoga advertising strategy being used by Yogaia, an online Yoga coaching business:

This blog targets popular keywords and search terms surrounding the topic of home yoga so that the people searching for home yoga tips will land on the Yogaia website.

This allows the brand to share their expertise with a potential customer, and it gives them the opportunity to promote their online yoga services directly to somebody who is actively looking for advice on practising yoga at home.

Writing high-quality blogs that target the right keywords can be time-consuming, but if you can get familiar with how to write a good blog yourself, it’s free!

Just as you did for your homepage and your sales pages, you can use Google keyword planner for this kind of research.

From 'Best yoga retreats' to 'Pilates history', there are an infinite number of keywords out there for you to use.

You can also track how well your articles perform for certain keywords by setting up a Google Analytics page.

The term ‘analytics’ might sound intimidating if this is something you aren’t familiar with yet, but Google offers completely free online analytics courses to help you get to grips with the platform.

Obviously, you’ll have to spend some time writing your blog content, but unlike a social media post that vanishes from a timeline in a number of hours, a well-written blog will bring traffic (and enquiries) to your website for years.

This option is a lot more affordable than using Google Ads to rank for the relevant search terms. But, that’s not to say you shouldn’t use Google Ads!

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Yoga Advertising Ideas: Paid Google Ads

Starting a blog and setting up a Google My Business account are both brilliant (and free!) ways of approaching your online marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn't consider using paid Google ads, too.

Think about it logically, if you wanted to find a local business, say a personal trainer, what would you do? You’d google it.

Your target market does the exact same thing!

By using Google Ads, you can ensure that when your target market inevitably searches for something along the lines of “yoga teacher near me” or “yoga teacher + location”, your business is the first that they see!

Although Google My Business can help out with this, if there are businesses in your area using paid ads for these search terms, Google My Business results are pushed further down the page.

Just like this:

If you’re worried about the costs, the best thing about Google Ads is that it uses a Cost Per Click (CPC) model, which means that you only pay for the ad when somebody clicks on the link to your website.

This cost varies depending on what term you want to rank for and how competitive that term is. Because the vast majority of yoga professionals overlook the power of PPC ads, the cost is relatively low!

How To Use Email Marketing for A Yoga Business

Once you’ve got traffic to your website, either through an organic approach like blogging, or through paid Google Ads, what are you going to do with this traffic?

The easiest and most effective way of turning traffic into sales is to build an email list and utilise email marketing.

As we mentioned earlier, you can acquire email addresses from the attendees from your online webinar, but how else can you grow a good sized email list?

You need to think about how you are going to get the email address from the visitors to your website.

Obviously adding an email form on screen is a good way to collect contact information, but how are you going to make somebody want to give you their email?

Think about what you can offer for free.

You’ve probably already come across something like this if you read health and fitness blogs at all. Usually, yoga teachers or personal trainers will offer a short guide for free in exchange for your email address.

Think about something of value that you can offer for free, and plenty of users will share their email address with you in exchange.

This can be as simple as a branded PDF guide or yoga-related content that is exclusive to those that sign up to emails.

Just as we mentioned under ‘Online workshops & webinars’, it’s really important that you follow the rules of GDPR when you’re dealing with this kind of data, so make sure you check out our guide to GDPR for fitness professionals.

Once you’ve built an email list, what now?

Getting the email address is the hard part, so if you get even one email address from this, congratulations on your new lead!

The next step is to decide how you are going to approach email marketing, how often and when you will reach out, and what you will send.

A hard sell approach will likely put people off and have them looking for the unsubscribe button straight away. Instead, an informative newsletter is always a winner.

In terms of how often you should reach out to your subscribers, think about how much it can annoy you when you receive constant emails from a brand. You don't want to be that person!

Sometimes, less is more, and when it comes to email marketing, quality is always better than quality.

Create good quality newsletters filled with useful information and valuable content and send them out consistently but not too frequently.

Depending on the size of your business and how much time you have to write this newsletter, this could be a weekly, bi-weekly, or even a monthly email.

Marketing A Yoga Business Offline

If you only take one thing away from this article, let it be this - online marketing is not the only way of marketing yoga retreats, studios, or 1-1 classes!

Yes, social media and Google are great ways of getting the word out there about your brand and your services, but that doesn’t make offline strategies any less effective.

Just as brand collaborations are a brilliant way to improve your reach and gain a bigger following on the likes of Instagram and Facebook, collaborations can work well offline too!

Think about ways of creating relationships with local businesses that offer similar, but not the same, services as you.

As a yoga teacher, you could approach the owner of a health snack shop, a supplement store, or even a personal trainer. Basically, try to approach pretty much any business that you think your target market might visit often.

By creating good relationships with the individuals who run these businesses, you open up the opportunity to ask them to display printed marketing materials for their customers and your target market to see.

This could also lead to a referral exchange between yourself and a similar business. You could create an arrangement and offer a reward when they refer one of their clients to your business, and you can do the same for them!

Marketing Yoga Classes: Referral Schemes

If you’ve already got any kind of client base, no matter how small, one of the best yoga marketing strategies to try is putting a refer a friend scheme in place.

Referral schemes are relatively easy to implement, they require minimal effort, and the best thing about it - you will only have to pay for this kind of marketing if it’s successful.

Asking your clients to take part in a referral scheme is a really effective way to get new clients because unlike with other yoga marketing studio ideas, your potential clients will hear about your business from their peers.

This is classic word of mouth marketing.

People trust recommendations from their friends much more than they value what they view from a stranger on social media, so the leads you do get from refer a friend schemes are always of a higher quality.

Plus, because people tend to socialise with others who have similar hobbies and interests, chances are your students will have a whole network of fit and healthy friends interested in practising yoga!

You can offer your existing clients a reward or discount for bringing a friend along to one of your classes to really incentivise the referral process.

Referrals Between Services

To wrap up our marketing tips for yoga studios, we thought we’d throw one in there for all of the yoga teachers who are also qualified as a personal trainer, a nutritionist, or any other related profession!

If you’ve been working as a personal trainer for a while now and have recently started to branch out into a yoga business, then this is the perfect opportunity for you to get new clients for both of your businesses.

Without even realising it, you’ve been meeting with a potential new yoga student every time you run a PT session.

Chances are the fit and active individuals who train with you, would love to add a yoga class into their workout routine - they just don’t know it yet.

If your clients are looking for new and exciting ways to exercise, why not refer them to your yoga services?

Even if they aren’t looking for something new to try, you can still bring up the benefits of yoga into conversation and even offer them a small discount for their first class.

It works both ways. Once you have a couple of yoga students, you might find that they find a love for fitness and want to take up personal training, too.

Because you already have a good relationship with them, they’ll be much more likely to come to you rather than seek out a different PT, especially if you offer a referral incentive.

This can work with tons of health and fitness professions, so why not pick up a new skill?

Written by Abbie Watkins

Holding an MA Marketing Communications and Branding as well as a BSc Psychology from the University of Liverpool, Abbie’s experience encompasses the retail, hospitality and fitness industries. Since joining OriGym, she has become a qualified Personal Trainer and gone on to complete a specialist qualification in advanced Sports Nutrition. Abbie’s main focuses cover staying up to speed with YouTube fitness influencers, identifying successful and innovative content formats. She has contributed to various publications, including the Daily Express. Beyond OriGym, she describes herself as a ‘work-hard, play-hard’ type going on scenic runs and upbeat exercise classes, and often found on the front row of a Saturday morning spin class.